Remove Social Side Bar?

[Motivators]

We recently had a site-redesign and since have lost traffic. We’re currently trying to clean up our code and improve site speed (which we know has become a very big problem). One of the things we tested was removing the social side bar. With that gone, our page speed, file size and requests to the page all improved greatly. And other than the homepage, we don’t see a lot of action on the social side bar with our internal category and subcategory pages.

With side bar: http://www.motivators.com/

Without: http://www.motivators.com/Trade-Show-Giveaways.html

We resubmitted the Trade Show Giveaways page to Google Webaster Tools yesterday and saw a 22-spot jump in ranking by this morning!

Given the circumstances, would it be unwise for us to remove that social side bar? Would it hurt us to lose those signals in the long run despite the overnight jump? Which is the lesser of two evils?

[josh-riley]

I feel like there could be conflicting answers on this one Social sharing has been such a popular thing to push for, more I think conceptually than for reality. Very few pages within a site do well with sharing - it's just usually not the type of info users want to share (no matter what marketers want to believe or what industry experts want to tell us).

The proof is in the numbers - so start there. Are people sharing your content? If they aren't, then what have you lost by removing it? (And I realize you kinda answered this question for yourself.) I'm of the belief that it works best on pages where there's content worth sharing - news, white papers, contests, etc. - if your system allows for specifics like that. And if the change with the social sharing overall will improve the user experience (like with load time), then is that a better trade off?

Since websites can have such different CRMs/platforms/coding, there's many things (I think ) that can play into performance or issues. Like, you resubmitted that trade show page and it may have jumped because Google hadn't crawled it in a long time, vs. because the social sharing changes. Just a possibility.